@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

stevel

@stevel@hachyderm.io

breaks things for a living. I'm clumsy -but to break really big things needs ambition. He/him as in "He takes the drugs they tell Him to so as to keep His reality consistent with everyone else’s.”

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gvwilson, to random
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

If I was a lot smarter than I am and someone would pay my salary for a year to do the work, I would try to turn https://ferd.ca/a-distributed-systems-reading-list.html into a book of examples like https://third-bit.com/sdxpy/.

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@gvwilson or just point people at @martin ‘s work +a few of the classic papers.
I do think someone needs to write a review of real world examples of people getting database isolation levels wrong, especially using bitcoin exchanges as “what not to do” references

davidallengreen, to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

How the Good Friday Agreement checks and balances the UK government

With the disapplication of the Rwanda policy in Northern Ireland, we can see how the 1998 treaty practically limits the power of the UK executive

New, by me

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/66236/how-the-good-friday-agreement-checks-and-balances-the-uk-government

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@davidallengreen the status of NI as something another government has a say in actually dates from 1985 and the Anglo Irish Agreement; it was this which motivated the DUP to set up their own paramilitary wing, Ulster Resistance. What the GFA added (along with EHCR in NI laws) was the structure where two “communities” had to share power rather than a simple majority-is-sovereign model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Resistance

stevel, to MTB
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

For some reason I find myself unable to join in conf calls today.
These cliffs are actually the remains of a limestone quarry: blocks cut here were carried by pony to the canal and beyond. The odd cones are not natural features: they’re the rubble just overgrown

llangattock, south wales

Grassy path up hillside. To the left : cliffs. In front a line of grassy cones l each about 5-6 metres tall
A black hard tail mountain bike rests on a stone. In. The background a range of welsh mountains: low and dark

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

And in the afternoon I went for a ride with B, who had to wait for me at the top of every climb. She now enjoys hills for this reason. e-bikes have a way of getting people who consider uphill climbs to be needless suffering to view them as “needless suffering for others”
Conical peak in the background is “Sugar Loaf”; we are in the Mynydd Du, “black mountains” of south wales

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

Still mysteriously unable to make zoom calls today.
Looking east from Sugar Loaf/Pen-y-fal; the hill is Skirrid and beyond that: the great plain of England

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

This paper is trash. We do this every few years.

The conclusion is correct (graduate degree holding white men believe the most 'taboo' conspiracy theories), but the reasons it suggests why, are sociology-babble garbage. The real reason is:

  • Racism is a lie. To believe in racism, you must believe a set of easily debunkable lies.
  • Richer, whiter, maler, more educated populations are not less racist, despite attempts to twist stats to say this. They're more racist.

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/05/believes-the-most-taboo-conspiracy-theories-it-might-not-be-you-think/

1/N

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@mekkaokereke problem with the US police :racist and armed; Growing up in inner London they used to stop and search us all for drugs & being unarmed they were less of a threat -though you soon learn that they don’t like sarcasm.
By the age of 18 I had no trust in the Metropolitan police -and now whenever I hear about another Met Police scandal I view it as a “breakthrough story” rather than new
The shock for me was moving to the Edinburgh and their Polis actually being pleasant

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@mekkaokereke one difference I should highlight is now that I’ve become respectable and middle class I get left alone. Whereas “driving an expensive car while black” is viewed by The Met as a sign you are a successful criminal and should be stopped and searched.

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@mekkaokereke our population is about 1/5 of the US. It’s death during police chases that kills, along with those in custody -that’s the one which doesn’t get enough attention

https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Annual-deaths-statistics-report-England-and-Wales-2022-23_0.pdf

stevel, to UKpolitics
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

bristol election results. Sunak would have written it off anyway (wasn’t worth spending money on election flyers), but central & a lot of suburban bristol has effectively opted out of Starmer’s lack of vision too, which should be stress for him. The same vote in a general election would give us a Green Party MP. The spurs east & down to knowle are interesting. Shows this isn’t just the metropolitan elite”

Di4na, to random
@Di4na@hachyderm.io avatar

For everyone that calls for ways to make open source more secure, or for all their magical solutions that will provide money and resources to FOSS maintainers, please read this.

This is a rare account of the reality of maintainers, things that are hard, but also how much knowledge and niche expertise you need for anything in there.

That is why just giving money to experts will not help that much. It is too hard to train experts in this. But we may make it easier

http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2024/05/hacking-on-postgresql-is-really-hard.html

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@Di4na scalability of reviewing is a real problem: I could probably go full time review code -but at the expense of my own work. But the barrier to giving people the commit bit is not just the ability the write great code -it’s to rigorously review other code and be ruthless about the quality of product and test code, even from colleagues
I’m pleased that none of my colleagues trust my code and treat it as a threat to the happiness their weeks being on call: ultimately they are correct.

thomasfuchs, (edited ) to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

If you think it’s impossible that large, established, publicly traded companies can be massive frauds you really need to read the Wikipedia article about Enron.

The alarm signals right now from Tesla (multiple senior people stepping down, massive axing of entire departments, rumored pivot to software/AI only) are bonkers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs well. The Enron email graph kept everyone analysing organisational communication structures for years. It’s time for a refresh which includes Slack messages and zoom meeting transcripts

robpike, to random
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

A nice talk by my ex-colleagues Eve Martin-Jones and Josie Anugerah about the misperceptions many have about dependency resolution. It's not nearly as simple a problem as the tool builders would have you believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-niBbN-ufYo&list=PLbzoR-pLrL6p2qBhq7OHXDzCTfIZuzCma&index=9

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@robpike it’s the one directed graph computer scientists are scared of. Not least because you eventually end up with a cycle in it and most tooling assumes it’s a DAG

davidallengreen, (edited ) to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

I don’t mind the cold - I prefer cold to heat - and torrential rain is bracing.

But this constant, constant drizzle is so irksome. Neither one thing nor the other. As if the weather is stuck hour-glassing between definite states.

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@davidallengreen if we could generate power from drizzle as easily as we can do from solar and wind, Britain would be the energy superpower greater than all the petrostates combined.

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@ComradeGibbon @davidallengreen ahh, that’s my other plan: once I’ve worked out how to manipulate magma with the electromagnets, I’m going to create a volcano in Norfolk. Get it up to 3600m and I will have a ski resort close enough to London for weekend visitors staying overnight at my premium lodge. And it will be mine as once the eruption starts buying up the land will be cheap.

stevel, to cycling
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

Missed this, though I’d heard about it in the week. I think an Easter Sunday Drum and Bass bike ride is exactly the kind of tradition we need -especially as Easter really marks the start of the “smoke weed in the parks” season

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-68704333

stevel, to random
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

Presumably, along with all of us making sure our products and services are safe , the offence teams at the other governments will be busy going through the backdoor to understand how to exploit it -and then seeing if there any interesting targets that are vulnerable before the weekend is over. Busy weekend for all of us on call.

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@jannic it’s been analysed.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2nsupeeo52oznrmplwapppl/post/3kowjkx2njy2b

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has resigned as leader of the Democratic Unionist party after being charged with historical sexual offences, throwing Northern Ireland politics into turmoil.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/29/sir-jeffrey-donaldson-resigns-as-democratic-unionist-party-leader

(Note for foreigners: the DUP are a right-wing Loyalist protestant party, so think of them as Northern Ireland's equivalent of the US Republican party.)

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@cstross BBC has a bit more detail. DUP may at least be relieved it’s not some scandal which strikes as the heart of their world view -such as starting an on-line degree course in Paeolontology

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-68686691

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

HT to @wdormann here - somebody has backdoored the open source project XZ which has downstream impacts.

For example, although OpenSSH doesn’t use XZ, Debian patch OpenSSH and introduced a dependency which translates as the XZ changes introducing a sshd authentication bypass backdoor it appears.

One dude bothered to investigate in his free time about why ssh was running slow, so it was caught fairly early - i.e. hopefully before distros started bundling it.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@analogist @ohmu @GossiTheDog + all the work to identify this library and it’s maintainer as vulnerable to “attack”. They had to work out that systemd loaded extra libraries into sshd, then examine all of them to identify
-small projects trusted as stable
-single mostly inactive maintainer.
They could code & test the exploit in parallel with the takeover -after doing some PoC to show that any exploit was possible

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@analogist @ohmu @GossiTheDog if I was in a team trying to do this, we’d have a spreadsheet on libraries+ maintainers w/ parallel takeover attempts -at least until we had control of Even then we’d keep out other fake GitHub accounts mildly active as contingencies.
Projects with binary files in the test sources are a clear win, hence a focus on compression. But any lib with regression testing of file formats needs those

stevel, to streetphotography
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

Railway Path . March 2024
First one has just been painted, which meant the artist had been there on Sunday am. Spoke to them briefly
#e is by rozilitaa; scooj has the full details https://scooj.org/2024/03/25/5908-greenbank-113/

Blue lets in an exploding red background
Thoughtful Frida Cahlo in turquoise abasing blue background, four red flowers around her

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

So from Easton, commissioned work by Face 1st on a house fence, plus someone’s done Thanos on a garage door. Documentation of demographic change in a somewhat deprived area. The new residents
-own whole houses, rather than rent
-have sufficient disposable income to spend a few hundred UKP on commissioned work
-think that painting house exteriors improves the area. I concur -but do note the change

image/jpeg
Adjacent wall has a second face, and an abstract mural
Thanos painted in on a garage door

stevel, to cycling
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

If any uses the cemetery town of Yate in the context of “shining city on a hill” they’ve overdosed on MDMA and need to put in a dark room with nothing but the Prodigy to listen to until they recover. But if you can negotiate the 1979s new town sprawl, it opens up some pleasant -just with foreboding dark clouds above the villages and pre-roman hill forts beyond- https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=4718

Old Cotswold stone church li by sun, dark clouds above highlight this
Narrow road between hedges heading towards hill on the Cotswold escarpment to the right; black rainclouds above

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

Someone has let the poets out. South Gloucestershire rural at its most radical

Road sign defaced “sing like the larks that fly over the common”

RuthMalan, to random
@RuthMalan@mastodon.social avatar

“As a rule software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. Generally, many uses and many failures are required before a product is considered reliable. Software products, including those that have become relatively reliable, behave like other products of evolution-like processes; they often fail, even years after they were built, when the operating conditions change.”
— David Parnas et al

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/78973.78974

stevel,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@RuthMalan @Di4na Parnas is under appreciated. All his work deserves a read, from his proposal of splitting interface from implementation to his denunciation of Reagan’s Star Works project “how exactly are you going to test this?”

I don’t think you could consider you a software engineer without doing so. maybe I should use that an interview question “you say you are a software engineer-which of Parnas’s papers do you consider to have most influenced your work?”

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